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Devnote Tuesday: Kerbal Space Program 1.0.5

SQUAD

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in KSP1 The Daily Kerbal

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SQUAD

SQUAD

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<figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="92" data-orig-width="480"><img data-orig-height="92" data-orig-width="480" alt="image" src="http://41.media.tumblr.com/0ff9377afa68dc3ad3fe6844aaf1bd38/tumblr_inline_nvthb8yrzw1rr2wit_540.jpg"/></figure><p>Hello everyone!</p><p>We bet the title of this week’s devnotes caught your attention, and for a good reason!</p><p>Those of you who have been following our devnotes over the past few weeks will have noticed that we ran into more work than we initially anticipated with the Unity 5 update. As we continued with the work it became clear that some things would be done on schedule while the engine update seemed to be in an eternal state of “just one or two more weeksâ€Â. This past week then, our production team - Ted and Max (Maxmaps) - sat down with everyone involved: developers, executive producers, artists, community people, and discussed the possibility of releasing the complete features sooner, in a separate update. That update, is Kerbal Space Program 1.0.5.</p><p>What then will be included in update 1.0.5?</p><p>Contextual Contracts by Brian (Arsonide)</p><blockquote><p>Contextual contracts aims to turn contracts into a more cohesive experience. To accomplish this a new system was created that detects and creates contracts for existing vessels. The more spacecraft are in orbit, the higher the chances are you will run into one of these new contracts.</p></blockquote><p>Thermal Improvements by Bob (Roverdude)</p><blockquote><p>Radiators, the ISRU and RTGs are all getting a bit of attention from Bob! Notably, the radiators can now be hotter than the parts they’re cooling, allowing for active refrigeration, the ISRU’s core now heats separately from its skin, and the RTGs now generate appropriate amounts of heat (though we cannot recommend using them as heaters).</p></blockquote><p>New, and Overhauled Parts by Chris (Porkjet)</p><blockquote><p>We already showcased a few of the parts that Chris has been working on lately, namely a Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) analogue, an overhauled Mk1 Cockpit, overhauled versions of the Basic Jet Engine, Turbo Jet Engine, Mk1 Fuselage, Mk1 Structural Fuselage and Mk1 Intake. These will be included in 1.0.5.</p></blockquote><p>Many bugfixes by Nathan (NathanKell) and the other developers</p><blockquote><p>NathanKell and the other developers have fixed dozens of bugs that we can include in this update, with the ever invaluable help of the QA Team in triaging, reproducing and fix-testing bugs. The main focus of these fixes are the thermal systems. We’ve included a full list <b><a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/356-Announcing-Kerbal-Space-Program-1-0-5">on the forums</a></b>.</p></blockquote><p>This week we’ve started QA testing different parts of the update already, and we hope to give you a better estimate of a release relatively soon based on how smoothly this process goes.</p><hr><p>Of course, work on the 1.1 update also continues: Felipe (HarvesteR) has focused on the flight interface, and also changed the workflow a little bit: instead of trying to get through all of the UI, he’s going through all of the overhauled bits which have been started, but were still pending revisions. That’s grown into quite a large list, and it’s become critical that any interface work that has been started gets finished, rather than keep on going and starting new things while leaving a trail of loose ends.</p><p>That means that currently Felipe is going over everything that’s already been moved over to the new user interface, and making sure it’s ready to go. That is taking quite a good deal of time and effort, not only because of the amount of work that needs doing, but also because the bar is set very high: this isn’t a new piece of content we are adding, it’s a revision of a very large, very established part of the game that has had years of polishing and bug fixing done to it. The minimum acceptable standard of quality is the same level it was at before.</p><p>Felipe also mentioned that this week has been a good opportunity to go over areas of the game that haven’t been visited in a while. He’s added a few new things here and there, whenever the opportunity arose. For instance, since the addition crew roles and levels, we’ve wanted to add a way to display the role and experience level of a crewmember on the main interface. The role and level of crewmembers is now displayed when hovering over their faces, provided it’s a career game (where roles are relevant).</p><p>More good news is that with the focus changing from completing the whole user interface overhaul to just completing the already-overhauled segments, the amount of work needed for the user interface work to be ready to integrate with the main development branch is greatly reduced, and we can then add in all the other parallel features that are being developed such as the KSPedia which Mike (Mu) has completed this week. The only thing left at the moment is compiling the help screens which will make use of this new system.</p><p>With the work on KSPedia done, Mike has updated the PartTools in preparation for 1.0.5. This is a relatively minor update, but a more interesting one is planned for 1.1 For update 1.0.5 the new PartTools will give modders the ability to use any shader built into the game, and also allows them to create an asset bundle containing shaders (with an extension of .shaders), which the game will load as a normal asset and can then be used in mods! Unfortunately, until the Unity 5 patch hits, these asset bundles will have to be built in Unity 4 which itself requires a Pro license to do.</p><p>Creating a new tweening controller to handle movable user interface elements was on this week’s task list for Jim (Romfarer). Initially the controller will be used by staging to move the list elements into place. In the new Unity interface the size and position of list elements are handled by their own internal controllers so once an item is in such a list, it can’t be moved. As a result a lot of smoke and mirrors are involved in making it look like those elements are moving.</p><p>For example, in the simplest case, you pick up a stage group. In order to make the list move fluidly in to close the gap of the element you just removed, a special invisible list element is placed where the element you removed was. Immediately it starts resizing until the height becomes zero and it destroys itself. While the resizing element is in there, the indexes of the stage groups does not match the indexes in the list. And this is what the tweening controller does best, figuring out what is where and where it ought to be as well.</p><p>Daniel (danRosas) made some changes to the Kerbal rig for the animations. A small revision of the mouth made it easier to move the mouth around. The mouth is now a joint based rig, whereas before the revision it was blendshape/curves oriented, which prevented the animations from being imported into Unity. The joint based system will allow these Kerbal characters to work inside the Unity engine.</p><p>After his fixes for the 1.0.5 update were complete Nathan (NathanKell) has focused on the bug fixes that will come in the Unity 5 update. Some of these are very infamous, such as launch clamps following the rocket, airbrakes that can’t have their action group changed, and various bugs related to the claw. Last week, a technical question related to the RequestResource system was asked, and it so happens that Nathan has also been looking into this for a while now:</p><blockquote><p><i>“Now, as is fairly well-known (and was mentioned in the question I want to respond to), that system trawls the entire vessel (if ALL_VESSEL or STAGE_PRIORITY_FLOW) or crossfeed-connected parts (if STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH) each time a request is made of a part. Now obviously that’s less than optimal. However, it’s done for a reason: we can’t just naively cache all available resources, because at any moment you might decouple, or dock (or go KABOOM) or even you might just toggle the flow state on a resource tank. That could add a resource to the list of resources available, or it could remove it. Further, there can’t just be one cache in the case of STACK because that is request-location-dependent. There are ways to do this based on listening for events, and multiple caches–and the new VesselModule system introduced in 1.0 will help immeasurably–but it’s not an easy thing we can just slap in. We’ll keep looking into it, however.â€Â</i></p></blockquote><p>On the non-development side of things we’ve learned that Kasper (KasperVld) had a great time at ESA’s OpenESTEC event, meeting industry people and representatives from organizations we’ve worked with over the past few years. Best of all, he came home with three posters signed by ESA astronauts that we have yet to figure out what to do with. Rest assured that we will make you work for them. He also asked us to remind the university students reading this that the ESA Moon Challenge is still open to interested students, but that the application period will end later this week. Read more <b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/ESAMoonChallenge">on their Facebook page</a></b>.</p><p>On Monday we were blown off our feet when people poked us about an <a href="https://cnes.fr/en/les-ressources-humaines-du-cnes/modelisation-de-systemes-spatiaux-sous-kerbal-space-program-2016pa2"><b>internship position</b></a> that has become available at CNES, the French space agency. They’re looking for a student intern who can model their future concepts into Kerbal Space Program, and make videos for the communications department. Not even an hour after that, we learned that the Paris based Exploradôme interactive museum will be holding a KSP event tomorrow.</p><p>Finally, Andrea (Badie) and Kasper have been making solid progress on the media group applications, and have assessed nearly all the applicants now. Once everything is done later this week they’ll be sending everyone who applied an email with the results.</p>

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KasperVld

KasperVld

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So, when will Unity 5 be coming? KSP's biggest problem right now is memory and performance.

We're still working on KSP 1.1, which will have the Unity 5 update. Since it's taking longer than we expected we took the parts that are ready to go and can be used in the Unity 4 version as well, and we're making them available as 1.0.5 now. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have you guys wait for those bits :)

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dlrk

dlrk

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We're still working on KSP 1.1, which will have the Unity 5 update. Since it's taking longer than we expected we took the parts that are ready to go and can be used in the Unity 4 version as well, and we're making them available as 1.0.5 now. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have you guys wait for those bits :)

Ah, that makes sense. Sorry, I thought U5 was 1.05, not 1.1

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adsii1970

adsii1970

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So... this explains why I had a crash today...

I'm having a memory bleed that I have not had before - and no, I have not installed any new mods in the last week. IS anyone else noticing the memory bleed?

Using one of the memory manager mods, I watched the game go from 2.570 to 3.335 - and all I did was go to the SPH. Once I went out to the center view, instead of memory usage dropping down, it remained at 3.335 MB...

Edited by adsii1970
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Ignath

Ignath

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<p>Contextual Contracts by Brian (Arsonide)</p><blockquote><p>Contextual contracts aims to turn contracts into a more cohesive experience. To accomplish this a new system was created that detects and creates contracts for existing vessels. The more spacecraft are in orbit, the higher the chances are you will run into one of these new contracts.</p>

Will mods like USI-LS (and others) be able to hook into this contract system to include things like Crew Resupply missions to Space Stations/Bases or will this be strictly "add this part to your existing vessel" or "add X more Kerbals to the vessel"

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RocketPilot573

RocketPilot573

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1.0.5! Sounds like a good plan to me. Also I am very pleased about those bug fixes. They are pretty much all relevant bugs that I have actually experienced before. Glad to hear that the my flag will now be properly flown at KSC. :D

Oh, and have we FINALLY broken through the impassable "QA starts next week" barrier? :wink:

Edited by RocketPilot573
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Brucey

Brucey

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Just a little respectful feedback: I would prefer if Squad makes the next update after 1.05 be the one with 64 bit/unity 5, even if that means a longer delay before the next update. New features are nice, but I'm really waiting for 64 bit and better performance before I get back into Kerbal Space Program.

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JonBar

JonBar

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If I didn't know better I would think this was all leading up to Full Release, as it should have been.

Also, same as Brucey ↑ What were they thinking with no 64 bit in full release? SMH.

They kind of beat around the bush by using the words 'scope' and 'complete', to justify their decision in 'Full Release'.

Edited by JonBar
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